When hosting a large web conference meeting or other online communication session with many participants, particularly meetings involving video content, the data streams can utilize significant bandwidth for an enterprise such as a corporation or organization. Certain techniques are known for reducing bandwidth usage for transmission of data streams to multiple end points, nodes or client devices, including, e.g., Internet Protocol (IP) multicasting. However, this particular technique can present certain challenges.
For example, in many instances, IP multicast over the Internet is blocked by an enterprise for security reasons. IP multicast also often requires specific management attention on the part of a network administrator to enable multicasting and preserve selected multicast ports. Accordingly, IP multicast can be labor intensive with respect to managing the network and, in any event, might not even be a viable option due to security concerns.